Trainspotted

It was a good thought. Caught up in the season (Thomas the Tank Engine was the major stocking stuffer this Christmas), we decided to escape the city by train on New Year’s weekend. The task: find a small town in the Northeast with an Amtrak stop close to a small downtown area with a hotel. Brattleboro, VT, fit the bill, particularly with the rather funky and unique old Latchis Hotel just a block from the Amtrak station.

We imagined clacking peacefully through the snowy north, drinking hot chocolate while our kids ogled birch forests through the window. Leave I-95 for the road ragers and long-haul truckers.

Of course, it was much more complicated than that.

Train travel with kids remains a mixed bag. On the plus side: There is no removing of the shoes, security scans or other inanities of the security age (like the recent emptying of Newark’s Terminal C). Once on the train, there are no seat belts of any kind (train travel may be three times deadlier here than in the UK, but it’s still safer than flying or driving, according to this Dartmouth study). Nor are there any dictums about when to sit or stand. You can get up for as long as you like, whenever you like, to buy a Sam Adams in the bar car, or just to rock the baby to sleep.

But it’s Amtrak, which means it’s also Slow and Expensive. The trip from New York to Brattleboro would have taken three hours in the car; it took five and a half hours on the train. The train cost $330 roundtrip for the four of us, instead of $70 of gas.

There were other annoyances: we were hoping to get the boy some milk on the way back, but the barman said that for six hundred passengers, they had stocked just 6 pints of milk. The seats were barely roomier than on an airplane, and the train was full and pretty dirty when we go on at Penn Station (much cleaner on the return).

But you know what? I’m glad we did it. Our nearly-4-year-old got bored at times, but there were stretches of fascination. It seemed to her like we had found some magical subway line that broke free of New York and made it into the woods. The train whistle enchanted her, as did the idea of a restaurant car, and she loved seeing the train stretch out behind us on a bend.

There are two reasons why that matters to me. First, there’s a constant fight as a father–against inertia and routine–to provide your kids with at least some diversity of experience. Before this weekend, she didn’t even know there was such a thing as a long-distance train. Now she does. So it isn’t quite a catalog of the entire human experience, but it’s a start.

Which leads to the second reason I’m glad we did it: Amtrak only sucks because certain powerful politicians want it that way. Amtrak will continue to need defenders: people who care about it, who have strong memories of it. After all, they say that John McCain started trying to kill Amtrak mainly after his wife Cindy was on a train that derailed in Texas in 1999. Hopefully when Dalia gets older, she’ll remember having been on some trains that didn’t derail, that cut finely through a snowstorm, that brought city people out to the Great North without cars.

It was a good weekend. We had Thai food for white people and stomped in the snowdrifts along Main Street. We went cross-country skiing and sledding just outside of town and hitched a ride with some locals back into Brattleboro. It wouldn’t have been the same with a car. Hopefully some part of her will remember that and other excursions to come and remember that train travel, even in the U.S., is worth fighting for.